The New Ship Classes & More FAQ

This is a list of generally asked questions about NSC that should help with general unknowns and minor issues. There are two “sections”, the “general” FAQ, listing questions frequently asked about NSC’s general operations, and the “bug” FAQ, normal issues that subscribers of NSC run into that we have answered many times.

NOTICE: If anyone can think of any other questions/answers that should be listed on this page or in the NSC Features Menu, please contact the NSC Dev team either on the Steam Workshop on one of the NSC mod pages (Main or Streamlined) or on the NSC Discord server (link provided towards the top of the NSC Main description).

New Ship Classes & More General FAQ

This is a list of generally asked questions about NSC that should help with general unknowns and minor issues.

Do you guys beta test your releases?

Yes, every release is extensively tested by over 130,000 beta testers. We’re very thorough.

Does the AI utilize the new ship classes?

Yes, the AI will use all the new ship classes introduced by New Ship Classes & More.

Why are there all these empty portrait groups in the empire design menu?

When you create a new “culture,” the game automatically adds three things: a shipset, a city-set, and a portrait group. NSC will always support the first two, but not always the last, as NSC is not a portrait mod. Unfortunately, you have to have all three parts; we have no means to hide the portrait groups without removing the shipsets & city-sets with them. If this ever changes, we will remove the empty sets. Also, if anyone has any portraits they believe would fit into any of these “empty” spaces, we will consider them so that they can be part of NSC, with appropriate credit going to the original author of the portraits.

Where is the Supercarrier? I cannot find it.

The Supercarrier is not a new ship class. It is an “upgrade” to the NSC Carrier class, giving the player new mid-sections giving 9 hangars each but lacking any other weaponry. This upgrade becomes available after you research the NSC Dreadnought ship class.

Why can’t I find any other Ship Classes? Why is the Battlecruiser my highest level ship?

For the 6 spaceport levels, you will get one ship class per level in this order:

Level 1 Spaceport: Corvette

Level 2 Spaceport: NSC Frigate

Level 3 Spaceport: Destroyer

Level 4 Spaceport: Cruiser

Level 5 Spaceport: NSC Strike Cruiser

Level 6 Spaceport: NSC Battlecruiser

After this, you will find the remaining 6 ship classes as individual techs in the Engineering branch. You must research each ship class individually in this exact order:

NSC Light Carrier

Battleship

NSC Carrier

NSC Dreadnought

NSC Superdreadnought

NSC Flagship

I cannot find the Science/Construction Cruiser. Where are they?

The NSC Science/Construction Cruisers do not automatically generate a design in the ship designer when they are researched. You must create a new design yourself. Inside the New Design list, you will not see “Science/Construction Cruiser,” however, you will notice two “copies” of “Science/Construction Ship.” The Science/Construction Cruisers will be the second/bottom listing of the “Science/Construction Ship.” Or you can simple try both. You will immediately notice the difference when you see the ship in the ship designer.

I built a new Mining/Power Station but my bonuses are the same. Why?

Paradox removed our best means of applying bonuses in the “Adams” update (Patch 1.6), so we had to find a new means of triggering the bonuses based on the number of stations. While not as efficient, the game checks every month after you build your first Power/Mining Station to see how many stations you currently have, and adjusts the given bonus to match. Therefore, after building/destroying a Power/Mining Station, wait up to 30 days for your bonus to adjust.

Why do only the vanilla ship designs and not NSC ship designs have names? They are blank.

This is the result of your chosen namelist not supporting NSC ship classes. Vanilla namelists include individual ship class namelists, but don’t support NSC Ship Classes. When the namelist cannot find a given ship class, it goes to the “generic” name pool, however, most namelists now have a very small or non-existent generic name pool, resulting in NSC ship class designs either having constantly repeating names or no names at all.

To fix this issue, you can either (1) find a modded namelist that supports NSC, (2) edit the namelist yourself to support NSC, or (3) download the template namelist provided by NSC in one of the discussion threads on the NSC workshop page and edit it further from there.

Is there any way to remove the “clutter” designs from the ship designer? It gets hard to keep track of things with this many ship classes.

NSC’s 12 ship classes (including the 4 vanilla ones) plus all the new stations and designable stations (in the Designable Stations Addon, linked in the addon section on the left side of this page) do put a lot of designs into the ship designer that can be hard to keep track of. This only gets worse if you use other Ship Classes mods. To help with this, the NSC Development Team found a “work-around” to trick the game into deleting the “last design” of any given class, which still works the last time we checked.

To explain, let’s use the example of you wanting to remove the last Corvette design you have (for this example, let’s say the design is named “Lightning”), but the game won’t let you since it’s the last design. First, make a new design for a ship class you intend to keep, for this example, Destroyer. All you need to do is make sure you can save the design, as you will be removing it later. Once you can, name the ship design “Lightning”. This is the key: the name of your new design here must match exactly to the ship design you wish to delete. Save the new “Lightning” Destroyer design. The game is “tricked” into deleting the last Corvette design and you now have a 2nd (or more) Destroyer design that is named Lightning. Since you can delete this one since it’s not your last design, simply delete it, and you should have no more Corvette designs in your ship designer. This should work across ANY ship/station class.

New Ship Classes & More Bug FAQ

This is a list of generally asked questions about NSC bugs that are normally encountered.

I have this weird glitch no one else seems to have. I cannot play multiplayer with my friends because it says our NSC versions are different.

This has become a common issue with Steam and is the most common “bug” the NSC development team is asked to address. Problem is 98% of the time, these issues are not caused by NSC. They are caused by faulty Steam downloads of the NSC zip file. Therefore, we ask before you submit any error reports for NSC that you follow these instructions below (also found in the NSC mod description under “Other Info”) to “reset” your local NSC copy to hopefully refresh any corrupt download from Steam. If you still have the error after this, then report the bug to us. Thank you.

HOW TO RESET NSC:

If your copy of the mod is not working properly, delete this entire folder from your PC: Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\281990\683230077 (or 932869910 if you use Streamlined, 949022828 if you use Playable Guardians Standalone) and then unsubscribe and resubscribe to the mod. Verify that Steam is downloading the mod, and then try to run again. You may have to repeat this step a few times to get it working. This is becoming a common problem with Steam and we cannot fix it from our end.

Why is NSC out-of-date in the mod launcher? Are you going to update it?

There are only 3 reasons NSC should be out-to-date on your PC.

You have a VERY old version that hasn’t been properly updated by Steam in a long time (perhaps because you haven’t played the game in a while), therefore you need to use the “reset NSC” method described on the previous page.

You have subscribed to an available beta via Steam. NSC only supports the latest public version of Stellaris, therefore, any betas would say “out-of-date” because NSC is supporting the public version one number behind. Some betas are compatible with NSC, others are not. If you have a beta that doesn’t work with NSC, please wait until it is released publicly.

A new patch was just released publicly and the NSC development team is working to update NSC to function within the new patch. Please be patient as we determine what exactly has been changed in the patch, as we get no more of a head start than any of you.

I researched X ship class but there is no design in the ship designer.

Every now and again Stellaris will not produce an automatic design in the ship designer for an NSC ship class. The NSC Dreadnought seems to be its favorite to skip. To check to see if you did get the ship class after researching it’s technology, look through the New Design listing in the ship designer. If it’s there, you just happen to have no auto-designed preset, but if the ship class isn’t there, something is wrong, and you need to try the “reset NSC” instructions on the previous page.

Why does the ship designer say “shipdesigner_savefail_wrong_required_components?” What does this mean?

This happens when the auto-designer gives a ship class design either a component it shouldn’t have access to yet or incorrectly sets a component that requires a mod that isn’t active. We cannot fix this on our end as the auto-designer is part of the hard coding, however, we can tell you how to fix this error yourself.

First thing is to look at the component section (the right side of the ship designer with the FTL, engines, sensors, etc). At the bottom is a component slot for Folk’s Power Stations mod and it may not have been properly set with the needed “empty slot,” whether or not you have Folk’s Power Stations mod. There are also NSC Special Slot components that can be placed in auto-design that are still locked behind techs, thus they are invalid at the moment. Please check each of the component slots (again, right side of the designer, starting at the bottom) and make sure the option currently selected is available from all your options. If it isn’t, replace it. Test again to see if you can save your design.

If you still cannot save your design, check the A-slots in the utility section (the bottom of the ship designer). Some NSC components go there that are locked behind techs you might not have yet, therefore, clear out your A-slots and refill them yourself then check to see if you can save.

Finally, if something is still off, check any T-slots you have in weaponry (top of the designer), and specifically check for any Flak guns. These weapons are meant to only be placed on NSC Frigates, however, the auto-designer likes to use them even though it’s ignoring restrictions. This error in the auto-designer is on Paradox end and we cannot fix it.

Why does my error.log have all these weird errors in it? Do you guys ever check the error log? Will you clean it out?

The “error.log” is not as cut and dry as we would like. We do constantly check for errors that are “real” errors that need to be addressed. However, many of the errors in the log are either not “real” errors, errors we cannot control, or errors that are ultimately meaningless. To give some examples, there are errors from the vanilla game that have nothing to do with NSC (the “.mod files” not being in “utf8-bom encoding” for example), others sometimes appear in vanilla files NSC doesn’t touch for some weird reason (if we cannot find it we cannot fix it, and that suggests it is not NSC), then there are errors that while are “technically” true errors, they actually don’t do any harm to the actual game (an example would be “missing locator” errors on this/that ship/station, where all this means is it cannot find the locator in question and it just moves that weapon or whatever to the center of the model, “defaulting”), and finally, the reason for this post, there are errors that are there intentionally.

Now, before you exclaim “what, why?,” understand that not all errors in the error.log actually “cause” real game errors. What this means is the error.log always tries to connect all links in all files, and if a link is not found, the game throws an error, even if that link “not being present” cannot hurt the game in any way. Example: the error.log might tell you that the component slot required for Folk’s Power Stations mod is “missing”, however, even if it’s missing, it doesn’t cause any real harm to the game. Same goes with Issen’s “Advanced Ship Behaviors Mod.” The error.log throws an error because the source coding is “not there”, but no real “error” is ever caused.

With this in mind, below is a listing of different “errors” that you might see in the error log that revolve around NSC but either are there intentionally (because they do no “real” harm and shouldn’t be reported as “real” errors) or they are “harmless” in any real sense to how you play the game, although they could be “fixed and removed” in a later update.

Common Harmless/Pointless Errors found in NSC:

“.mod file should be in utf8-bom encoding” – A Paradox error. Nothing we can do about it.

“Duplicate of this/that/the-other”– This one will appear many times, but as far as we can tell, this doesn’t create any “real” errors in the game, so it should be harmless. In particular, the “duplicates” of the Guardian systems (the “init” ones) are harmless because they overwrite.

“Failed to create material with shader Skinned” – This error (which appears twice) is caused by one of the ship models for the Creatures of the Void shipset not having a proper shader to fix an overlap glitch. While technically an error, it doesn’t do any actual harm in-game and what “causes” this error fixes a major visual bug.

“Failed to find texture ‘eventship_04_diffuse.dds'” – This is another paradox error because there is no such diffuse in the current Stellaris game.

“Component template key used multiple times: GUARDIAN_WARP” – Here intentionally by changes made to NSC. This path was easier, and it’s one error line only.

“Missing modifier icon” – Paradox error.

“ship section entity “npf_01_dirty_npc_warship_01_hull_entity” is missing required locator “large_gun_05_R”” & “Section template “automated_dreadnought_dirty_key” with entity “npf_01_dirty_npc_warship_01_hull_entity” is missing locator “large_gun_05_R”.” – Remember that missing locator errors are actually harmless, it just moves a weapon to the center of the model, however this is a Paradox error in the vanilla Automated Dreadnought asset entry. This asset entry has been copied and changed by NSC (for the Playable Guardians feature) and has been fixed in that version of the asset entry. Thus, this error is ultimately pointless as the “entity” in question isn’t used with NSC active.

“A ship design named “Pirate Galleon” already exists! file: common/global_ship_designs/pirate_ship_designs.txt line: 673″ – This is like the duplicate one mentioned previously. This really doesn’t matter as only one (the NSC “improved” design) is used, thus no actual errors occur.

“invalid component set “ai_behaviour”” & “invalid component set “powerstation_components”” – These are errors that are not “actual” errors. The first one (ai_behavior) is what allows Issen’s ASBM mod to be automatically compatible with NSC, and the latter (powerstation_components) allows Folk’s Power Stations mod to be automatically compatible with NSC. These errors only appear if the mod in question is not present alongside NSC. However, even if they are not, there is no harm done as the slots don’t necessarily need components to function. The convenience of having both mods automatically compatible are worth these “false” errors.

“Error in fire event effect at file: events/modmenu_events.txt line: XX, could not find event:” – These errors (up to 4) appear in NSC is used without Had’s Mod Menu Mods (Autobuild, Board That Ship, Harder Invaders, & Human Fallen Empires). These errors are caused by these mods not being present (one per mod). However, due to how the system is coded, if those mods are not present, the button that could cause “error/harm” to the game isn’t present, and even if it was, it wouldn’t cause errors, just nothing would happen when you selected a particular button. Thus, these errors are here because the “events” are not present, but their absence causes no actual harm.